Brendan Nyhan

False hopes on Obama approval

A New York Times story on President Obama's approval rating yesterday included this unpersuasive claim:

If Congress passes Mr. Obama’s health care bill, the White House — and many independent analysts — believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president’s approval ratings back up.

I can see why the White House might make this argument to wavering Senate moderates, but who are these unnamed "independent analysts" and what are they talking about? I don't know any reason to expect that Obama will receive a significant approval boost from passage of health care.

Let's consider the last three presidents who passed a "signature campaign promise" during their first year in office -- Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush. (I'm omitting George H.W. Bush, who didn't have much of a domestic agenda.)

-Congress passed Reagan's budget on June 25, 1981 and passed his tax bill on July 29, 1981. Here are his approval ratings from Gallup from that period:

6/5-8/81	59%
6/19-22/81	59%
[Budget passes June 25]
6/26-29/81	58%
7/17-20/81	60%
7/24-27/81	56%
[Tax bill passes July 29]
7/31-8/3/81	60%
8/14-17/81	60%

Do you see an approval boost? I don't.

-Bill Clinton signed his deficit reduction bill on August 10, 1993 (the major votes were on August 5 and 6). You can argue about whether this was a "signature campaign promise" (Clinton increased his focus on the deficit after taking office), but it was the major legislative accomplishment of his first year in office and there's no evidence he received a boost from it:

6/29-30/93	46%
7/9-11/93	45%
7/19-21/93	42%
[Bill passes August 5-6]
8/8-10/93	44 %
[Bill signed August 10]
9/10-12/93	47

-Finally, there's George W. Bush, who passed his tax cut bill on May 26, 2001 and signed it into law on June 7, 2001 -- as with the previous two examples, there was no discernable bump in approval (I'm omitting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill, but the story is the same there):

4/20-22/01	62%
5/7-9/01	53%
[Bill passes May 26, signed June 7]
6/8-10/01	55%
6/11-17/01	55%
6/28-7/1/01	52%
7/10-11/01	50%

The larger story here is that many journalists and political operatives have a wildly exaggerated view of the president's ability to change public opinion outside of a foreign policy context (as with the Obama's health care speech). The reality is that Obama, like his predecessors, is largely at the mercy of the economy and external events unless a new war or foreign policy crisis emerges.

Update 11/25 8:50 PM: Via a reader comment on Pollster, here's another useful comparison -- LBJ's approval numbers when Medicare was enacted (it passed Congress July 27-28, 1965, and was signed into law on July 30):

5/13-18/65	70%
6/4-9/65	69%
6/24-29/65	66%
7/16-21/65	66%
[Bill passes July 27-28, signed July 30]
8/5-10/65	65%
8/27-9/1/65	64%

The same conclusion applies.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Palin smears Obama on troops

Via Ben Smith, an utterly baseless claim by Sarah Palin that Obama does not "acknowledge the sacrifices" of US military:

“There’s been a lack of acknowledgment by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country,” Palin said during an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women — our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters — are providing this country to keep us safe.”

“They’re making sacrifices,” said Palin, who visited the Army base at Fort Bragg on Monday as part of her ongoing book tour. “They’re putting so much on hold right now so that the homeland can be safe and they can fight for democratic ideals around our world. I want to see more acknowledgment and more respect given to them.”

Mrs. Palin, let me Google that for you -- here are just a few examples from the first page of search results:

February 27 (speaking to the troops in Iraq): "Under enormous strain and under enormous sacrifice, through controversy and difficulty and politics, you've kept your eyes focused on just doing your job."

Memorial Day address: "These are some of the ways we can, must, and will honor the service of our troops and the sacrifice of their families."

June 30: "Through tour after tour of duty, our troops have overcome every obstacle to extend this precious opportunity to the Iraqi people. These women and men are not always in the headlines, but they're in our hearts and prayers, and we will forever honor their selfless service and sacrifice, as well as the service and sacrifice of their families."

November 20 (speaking to the troops in North Korea): [W]hile you made sacrifices that few Americans will ever truly understand, I want to assure you -- every American appreciates what you do. I say today, on behalf of the American people: We thank you for your service. We honor you for your sacrifices. And just as you've fulfilled your responsibilities to your nation, your nation will fulfill its responsibilities to you.

I could go on (feel free to peruse the results), but the point is clear -- Palin's suggestion that Obama hasn't "acknowledge[d] the sacrifice" of US troops is simply false.

Pundit psychiatrists on Palin, Obama

The only thing worse than pretending to read minds is offering long-distance diagnoses of mental illness in your political opponents -- a practice that has become increasingly common among pundits on the left and right.

In the last few weeks, the board-certified psychiatrist trio of Michelle Goldberg, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage have diagnosed Sarah Palin and Barack Obama with a variety of mental disorders. Instead of the swami, I'm debuting a new graphic for bogus pundit psychiatry -- Lucy's psychiatric booth from Peanuts.

Here's Goldberg, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect, diagnosing Palin at The Daily Beast:

Palin, however, lies when there’s little to be gained by lying, and she lies when everyone knows the truth. If Bill Clinton were a Palin-style liar, he’d still be insisting that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was entirely chaste, or he’d claim that he never denied it in the first place. If Hillary Clinton lied like Palin, she’d put the Bosnia anecdote in her next memoir. Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, coupled with her recent media appearances, evinces a dishonesty that seems as much clinical as opportunistic. Maybe Palin really does suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.

And here are transcripts of Glenn Beck on Fox News and Michael Savage on his syndicated radio show courtesy of Media Matters:

Beck and psychiatrist [ and Fox News contributor Keith] Ablow not psychoanalyzing the president -- just discussing what's "wrong" with him. On the November 11 edition of his Fox News program, Beck stated to Ablow: "I wrote to you, and I said, 'Do you see anything wrong here as a -- ' I'm not asking you to psychoanalyze the president. I'm saying, psychoanalyze the American people. Are we crazy for saying something is not right?" In his reply, Ablow stated: "We're not crazy for saying something's not right. It's a little crazy that more people aren't saying it more loudly." Ablow later stated: "[T]here is a big, cavernous gulf, apparently, between the president's ability to generate emotion and charisma and gripping words that move people when he's scripted. And then, when there's less time to prepare, there's some sort of lack of connectedness, a true lack of connectedness with at least what moves the majority of us." In discussing Obama's statements about the Fort Hood shooting, which Beck claimed were "disconnected," Ablow said: "[I]f he's not scripted to deliver the emotional cues, if he's not scripted to have lots of time and a teleprompter to do it, then he tends to stumble. And this was a huge stumble. This was a big, big window on the man's soul, I think." [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 11/11/09]

Savage's psychoanalysis: Obama has "deep psychological problems," "deep-seated inferiority feelings." While discussing Obama's bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito, Savage stated that "this man has deep psychological problems" and that "since we know he is only a man, and therefore since all men suffer from psychological problems, is it not logical to assume that he may have psychological problems? And if so, what are his psychological problems, and how do they affect this man's behavior and his overt contempt for America, its history, and its people and his love of everything third-world?" He later claimed that "you start to put a picture together of a guy who has such deep-seated inferiority feelings, it seems as though he's looking for his father all over the world." [Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation, 11/17/09]

Update 11/25 8:30 AM: See also Bob Somerby on the questionable factual basis for Goldberg's claims about Palin's lying.

Failed AP factcheck on Palin

Let me recommend Greg Marx's critique of the AP's Going Rogue "fact check", which illustrates how the paradigm can go horribly wrong.

As Marx notes, the AP critique frequently targets claims that fall short of the standard we tried to uphold at Spinsanity -- statements that are false or blatantly misleading. In some cases, the claims in question are simply standard political rhetoric -- like almost every politician, Sarah Palin frames herself positively and makes her opponents look bad while omitting arguably relevant context. In others, the AP objects to statements (Alaskans don't want help from government, her political career wasn't driven by ambition) that can't be directly falsified.

In the past, I've noted similarly ill-conceived fact-checks at Factcheck.org (here and here) and the Washington Post. After working on Spinsanity, I understand the temptation to publish an article after investing a lot of time in research and the pressure to produce content on a schedule, but it's important to reserve fact-checks for claims that are truly objectionable.

The best parallel here is Michael Moore's Sicko. As my former Spinsanity co-editor Ben Fritz and I wrote, Moore's previous dissembling led to extensive fact-checking of the film (just as with Palin). Despite finding relatively few mistakes (especially in comparison with Moore's previous work), several outlets published highly nitpicky critiques of the film anyway (as the AP did with Palin):

The mainstream media has started fact-checking Michael Moore one movie too late.

As veteran fact-checkers of Michael Moore, we should be taking a victory lap in the wake of "Sicko." The liberal icon's latest film has been aggressively fact-checked by major outlets including CNN's Sanjay Gupta, the Associated Press, and USA Today.

However, the media has decided to pounce on Moore just when he seems to be addressing his problems with accuracy. As a result, they have little to say -- indeed, the weakness of the criticism makes Moore look thoughtful and careful with his facts by comparison.

The primary focus of these analyses is to point out that he only tells one side of the story. That is undoubtedly true, as it has been in all his work, but also obvious. Despite Moore's protestations to the contrary on NPR Monday, he is a propagandist. As such, he is under no obligation to present a balanced perspective.

The rest of the critiques -- which focus on discrepancies in health care statistics -- are so minor that even we can hardly protest...

So why are the media going after "Sicko" so aggressively?

... When it comes to fact-checking, the mainstream media tends to wait until the evidence (or the narrative) that someone is a serial dissembler becomes overwhelming... In our experience, outlets that want to seem "objective" rarely fact-check without some sort of strong pretext.

The same logic seems to apply to Moore. With "Stupid White Men" and "Bowling for Columbine," we were one of the few sources documenting his mendacity. However, after "Fahrenheit," several major media outlets began to wake up and question Moore's facts, including Newsweek and USA Today.

With Moore's reputation for dishonesty growing along with his profile, we weren't surprised that CNN, USA Today and the AP thought it was worth devoting their resources to checking the facts in "Sicko." We did the same, assuming Moore would continue his pattern of deception. When we didn't find compelling evidence, we decided not to write about the topic. But the media outlets who had assigned the story apparently felt that they had to write something. As a result, they attempted to critique a movie whose greatest sin was simply being one-sided.

Marx's final paragraph summarizes the problem eloquently:

This sort of thing matters because, in an increasingly contested political landscape and wide-open media environment, there really is a need for fact checking. There is value in forging a consensus across ideological lines that adherence to the facts is a prerequisite for public debate, and the AP is, theoretically, just the sort of institution that can help police politicians who mislead the public. But for the idea of fact checking to have any weight—and any hope of broad credibility—it must mean something more specific than "contesting a statement that we disagree with." When Sarah Palin talks about "Obama's 'death panel,'" she's spreading misinformation that needs to be repudiated. When she talks about being beckoned by purpose, she's being a politician. We need to recognize the difference.

Update 11/23 8:39 AM: The AP trumpeted their success in an internal memo:

It was a literary treasure hunt. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" was perhaps the most anticipated memoir of the year, the pre-order alone placing it at the top of some best-seller lists, and leading newspapers, Web sites and television outlets were clamoring for an early copy...

...[T]he AP was determined to get the first copy.

Finally, they learned that a store had inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date.

They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched. A NewsNow moved within 40 minutes, followed quickly by multiple leads as details were gleaned from the 413-page manuscript.

The story commanded massive play, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal.com and USA Today, the three major television networks, and major Web sites and portals Yahoo, Google, Huffington Post and Politico. The Washington Post did a separate story about how the publisher's carefully orchestrated rollout was foiled, and Palin herself, not happily, noted the scoop on Facebook.

It's a classic example of how the chase for "breaking news" lowers standards. The AP was determined to be first and devoted a huge amount of resources to beating other outlets to the story. This counts as a win according to the strange rules of journalism in which being first is more important than being right. (The quality and content of the story received no attention in the memo.)

Newsweek profits from Palin cover

Newsweek's decision to run a picture from Sarah Palin's ill-advised Runner's World photo shoot on its cover is being condemned as sexist by everyone from Palin herself to Media Matters, and rightfully so.* Some conservatives have also condemned the cover as demonstrating Newsweek's liberal bias, which may also be true.

However, I think the most convincing explanation of the cover decision is not sexism or liberal bias, but economics. Newsweek is losing money and struggling to remain relevant in a 24/7 media culture. Running provocative covers is one of the few remaining ways that the magazine can create buzz, which should boost single-copy sales among marginal readers and increase readership (and consumption of advertising) among subscribers.

* Even more offensive is the the magazine's decision to include a picture of a doll portraying Palin as a slutty schoolgirl inside the magazine.

The looming 2012 health care battle

National Journal's Ron Brownstein makes an important point about health care -- even if the Democratic reform bill is signed into law, Republicans are likely to try to repeal it if they take back the White House in 2013:

If Obama does sign a reform bill, which appears more likely than not, Republicans will face a momentous choice between consolidation and repudiation -- between accepting the new program and seeking to dismantle it. The alternative paths are neatly captured by the GOP's contrasting reactions to the two central cords of America's existing social safety net. After FDR got Social Security approved in 1935, Alf Landon, his Republican challenger in 1936, denounced it as "unjust ... stupidly drafted [and] ... folly." Roosevelt's landslide victory over Landon (and subsequent re-elections) provided Social Security the time to build impregnable support. But many congressional Republicans kept fighting the program until President Eisenhower, a Republican, declared a truce after his election in 1952.

By contrast, Republicans largely accepted Medicare soon after President Johnson signed it into law in 1965. Although conservative Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had fiercely condemned the program before its creation, Nixon during the 1968 campaign spared Medicare from his criticism of the Great Society's cost. Once elected, he quickly "became a strong supporter of Medicare" and effectively ended challenges to its existence, Morone notes.

Which path might Republicans follow if Obama signs universal health care? Several factors point toward confrontation. The GOP accepted Medicare so quiescently partly because the program began dispensing benefits just one year after passage and rapidly became too popular to assail. Social Security, though, was phased in over many years--as health care reform is slated to be. Such delay can invite "fierce and protracted ... guerrilla war," notes Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol.

Also encouraging confrontation is the breadth of Republican opposition. Almost all House Republicans at the time voted to derail Medicare and Social Security by "recommitting" the bills to committee. But once those challenges failed, about half of House Republicans backed Medicare on final passage and four-fifths supported Social Security. House Republicans last week voted 176-1 against the health care bill.

Some senior House Republicans have already pledged to repeal any health care bill if they regain the majority. And many GOP challengers in 2010 will surely echo them. But with Obama holding a veto pen, Republicans probably couldn't mount a real threat unless they won the White House in 2012. One top adviser to a possible 2012 GOP presidential contender says that, given the GOP base's hostility to the reform plan and independents' unease, it is likely that "most potential [Republican] candidates will argue for wholesale replacement with their own version of health care reform."

If Obama passes health reform and Republicans then seek its repeal, the next presidential election could lastingly redefine America's social safety net. Like 1936 and 1968, 2012 looms as a crossroads in the relationship between Americans and their government.

Specifically, the bill defers the insurance subsidy system and the health insurance exchange until 2013, From a political perspective, it would presumably make more sense to deliver all of the bill's benefits before the election that could decide its fate. So why is the bill structured this way? Here are a few possible reasons:

1. Deferring implementation until 2013 limits the costs of the bill under Congressional budget rules.

2. It avoids embarrassing implementation problems taking place during the campaign.

3. Setting up the health insurance exchanges is technically difficult and will take several years.

4. Despite the plan's bad poll numbers, Democrats want the 2012 election to be about health care (a traditionally favorable issue).

In any case, even if Republicans gain ground in Congress and take back the White House in 2012, they would still have to defeat a Democratic filibuster in the Senate to repeal the bill. The odds of all those things happening aren't especially high. But given the strength of the conservative base, we should expect a long GOP guerrilla war to try to weaken and undermine the program if it does in fact pass. This issue isn't going away any time soon.

Update 11/17 12:46 PM: Matthew Yglesias clarifies an important point that I wasn't clear about -- a GOP effort to "repeal" health care reform wouldn't necessarily eliminate every provision of the enacted legislation. However, from the standpoint of Democrats and advocates of reform, the changes Republicans are likely to propose would almost surely be seen as gutting the legislation.

Update 11/18 5:16 PM: The Kaiser Family Foundation has posted a useful summary of the House bill that includes implementation dates for key provisions.

Continetti's unlikely case for Palin

Least plausible political argument I've seen today -- Matthew Continetti's Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming Sarah Palin's "poll numbers among independents are strong enough to give her a chance" to make a comeback (coincidentally, he wrote a book defending her). Here's the key passage on Palin's poll numbers:

Ms. Palin's unpopularity—the result of horrendous media coverage and her role as the McCain campaign's pitbull—is a major political obstacle. Her unfavorable rating hovers around 50%, the point at which most politicians would reach for the Valium.

An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin's favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn't seriously consider supporting her for the presidency.

Yet Ms. Palin isn't as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. As Hillary Clinton's career shows, public perception changes over time. Ms. Palin remains highly popular among Republicans (69% favorable). But the Democrats' striking antipathy to the former governor—she has a 72% unfavorable rating among them—drives down her overall approval.

Independents are a different story. These are the folks who decide presidential elections, and they are divided on Ms. Palin. In last month's Gallup poll, Ms. Palin had a 48% unfavorable and 41% favorable rating among independents. Not good, but not insurmountable. Flip those percentages, and they could be serving moose burgers in the White House in 2013.

What drives independents' uncertainty is their feeling that Ms. Palin isn't up to the job. Independents blanch at her perceived lack of expertise on issues unrelated to energy or abortion. They look at Ms. Palin's disappointing interview with Katie Couric last year, or laugh at Tina Fey's impression on "Saturday Night Live." Her resignation—still not fully explained—stokes their worst fears.

Continetti goes on to outline a strategy that he believes Palin could use to rehabilitate her image. But Palin's reputational problems are more profound than he admits. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, perceptions of Palin's qualifications for the presidency are shockingly low for a former presidential/VP nominee -- there's been no one comparable to her since Dan Quayle. As such, while it may be true that independents are "divided" in their feelings toward Palin (41% favorable, 48% unfavorable), they tilt heavily toward viewing her as unqualified. Continetti doesn't mention any polls on the subject, but a Gallup survey released last week found that only 28% of independents (and 58% of Republicans!) believe Palin is qualified to be president -- significantly lower than the other prominent Republicans included in the survey (Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich). Given how much people already know about her and how much negative attention she draws from Democrats and the press, it's extremely unlikely she will turn around those numbers. In other words, keep the moose burgers on ice.

PS Note to Continetti: It's a bad sign when you have to clarify that Palin is more popular with John Edwards, a man who cheated on his wife while she was battling cancer.

Update 11/18 9:46 AM: This post was cited in a Christian Science Monitor story on Palin's 2012 prospects.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Michael Steele says what?

In addition to imitating white Republicans like Eddie Murphy and creating a blog that was briefly called "What Up?", RNC chairman Michael Steele also became the first major political figure to use the Wayne's World "Not!" catchphrase as a debating tactic on Sunday (via my friend Ben Fritz):

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you hear Governor Kaine talk about it, [the health care bill that passed the House] sounds pretty good...

STEELE: Well, it sounds good...

(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: ... only one Republican voted for it.

STEELE: ... Not! No, look, you know, Teddy Roosevelt probably didn't have this in mind. And certainly, this would have been one of those things he would have hunted on the big -- big range and shot dead.

Maybe the RNC should consider bringing in Dana Carvey or Mike Myers (they're available!) -- it's hard to imagine them doing much worse than Steele.

Hannity links Obama to Fort Hood

Conservative elites continue to exploit the misperception that President Obama is a Muslim. The latest offender is Fox's Sean Hannity, who suggested Monday night that President Obama was somehow responsible for the Fort Hood shooting:

This Fort Hood situation is really beginning to disturb me and should disturb everybody. And that is that there is a chance our government knew all about this guy Hasan and did nothing because nobody wanted to be called an Islamophobe. We're not talking about Islam, we're talking about radical Islam. You know, this guy going in there, god is great, etc., etc., and all the things he's saying. But everybody hat worked with him, Bob, knew ahead of time, our government apparently knew and did nothing. Now, this is a terrorist act, if in fact this was motivated in such a way. What does it say about Barack Obama and our government?

By stating that "our government apparently knew and did nothing" about "a terrorist act" and then asking "What does it say about Barack Obama and our government?," Hannity implies that Obama is sympathetic to Islamic terrorism.

Other, more fringe figures also tried to link Obama to the Fort Hood massacre:

-Leading birther Orly Taitz nonsensically invoked the shooting as a rationale for her groundless lawsuit challenging Obama's eligibility for office.

-Jerome Corsi falsely claimed the alleged Fort Hood shooter advised the Obama presidential transition in a World Net Daily article.

These are only the latest in a long series of attacks on Obama that capitalize on false perceptions about his religious beliefs (building on a related series of attacks during the campaign):

-Hannity misconstrued the statements of a member of the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships as a claim that Americans support Sharia law in Muslim countries.

-A New York Post op-ed and other sources previously made the unsupported claim that President Obama's nominee to serve as legal advisor to the State Department wants to institute Sharia law in this country's courts.

-Conservative pundit Frank Gaffney has claimed "there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself," suggested that Obama's apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was "code" telling "our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them," and said Obama is "pursuing [an agenda] that is indistinguishable in important respects from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission ladies and gentlemen... is to quote to destroy Western civilization from within by its own miserable hand."

-On the Lou Dobbs radio show, substitute host Tom Marr said "I have to believe that there is still an inner Muslim within this man that has some sense of sympathy towards the number one enemy of freedom and democracy in the world today, and that is Islamic terrorism."

-Former Washington Times editor Wes Pruden wrote that Obama's speech in Cairo was a "revelation of his 'inner Muslim'..."

-Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich alleged that there is a "weird pattern" in which Obama administration officials were "prepared to take huge risks with Americans in order to defend terrorists" and claimed that the Obama administration's "highest priority" is to "find some way to defend terrorists."

-Senator James Inhofe called Obama's Cairo speech "un-American" and said "I just don't know whose side he's on."

I've added several of these quotes to my timeline of smears against Obama's loyalty.

Dick Armey: Elitist

I tend to believe that many elites who promote misinformation don't actually believe what they're saying, but it's rare that you see someone being as candid about it as Dick Armey:

Armey prides himself on his intellect and rationality, but his years in Washington have taught him the political uses of irrationality and even outright fantasy. He told me he does not believe some of the most extreme charges that emerged in the debate over health care reform — for example, that "death panels" will tell elderly people when it's time to die — but he welcomes the energy and passion that such beliefs bring to his side. "You know that expression: The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" he asked. "Are their fears exaggerated? Yeah, probably. But are Obama's promises exaggerated? I may think it's silly, but if people want to believe that," he said, referring to death panels, "it's O.K. with me."

But back in September, Armey appeared to defend the "death panel" claim after President Obama called it "a lie":

Dick Armey, the former House leader who organized the rally, added his own patriot: "Patrick Henry said, 'Give me liberty or give me death.' Well, Barack Obama is trying to make good on that."

Approached by a reporter after the speeches, Armey said that what [South Carolina Rep.] Wilson did [shouting "You lie!" during President Obama's speech to Congress] was no worse than what Obama did in calling the death-panel myth "a lie, plain and simple." Wilson's fault, Armey said, was that "he should not have expressed himself so clearly and openly as he did."

"I mean, give ol' Joe Wilson a break here," Armey said. For an opposition party trying to harness public furor, it was the only option.

The bottom line is clear -- for Armey, the ends (stopping health care reform) justify the means (misleading people about the proposed legislation).

John Shadegg uses baby as a prop

Breaking new ground in the use of props on the floor of Congress, Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) dispensed with Robin Hood quotes and cartoon dragons. Instead, he took the even classier route of holding up a baby and putting words into her mouth (via NPR):

As member of the House debated the health care reform bill on Saturday, one Congressman used an unique approach in opposition of the bill's passage.

Holding a baby, Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) spoke for her, saying that she does not want government-run health care.

"This is Maddie. Maddie likes America because we have freedom here and Maddie believes in patient choice health care. She has come here to say she doesn't want government to take over health care. She wants to keep her plan," Rep. Shadegg said.

"Maddie knows if this bill passes, she knows her mom's health care will go away and won't be around for five years. If the bill passes then no more health care for her mom because it has to change. Maddie wants patient choice," Rep. Shadegg said.

"She doesn't want her mom's premiums to go up. She doesn't want her mom's taxes to go up by $730 billion, do you, Mattie?"

"She wants America's health insurance companies to have to compete with each other. She believes in choices, but most of all, she says, don't tax me to pay for health care that you guys want. If you want health care, pay for it yourself, because it's not fair to pass your health care bills on to me and my grandchildren," Rep. Shadegg said.

I don't think Shadegg wants to be Speaker -- I think he wants to be Jeff Dunham:

PS Maddie, I'm sorry!

The House health care vote

Since people seemed to like my post on the Coburn amendment, here are some political science visualizations of the 220-215 final passage vote on the House health care bill.

First, here is Royce Carrol's auto-generated plot of the vote using Lewis-Poole optimal classification estimates:

The cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line separating yes from no votes, performs extremely well (414 of 435 votes are correctly predicted). Its orientation (not far from vertical) indicates that the vote was largely driven by the left-right ideological divide.

Similarly, here is a one-dimensional visualization of the vote from Simon Jackman's blog using Clinton-Jackman-Rivers estimates of member ideal points (members are arrayed from liberal to conservative as you move from left to right; click on the graphic for a larger version):

Jackman also created a nice plot of the relationship between Obama's vote share by House district and Democratic members' votes on final passage:

For more on the House Democrats who voted no, see this interactive graphic from the New York Times and this CQ Politics analysis.

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The Coburn amendment vote

Yesterday the Senate defeated Tom Coburn's amendment to kill the National Science Foundation's political science program -- which had my colleagues up in arms -- by a 62-36 vote that broke down largely along party lines:

Party	Yes	No
Democrats	5	53
Republicans	31	9

To understand the vote breakdown better, we can use this graphic, which was automatically generated by Royce Carroll using the Lewis-Poole Optimal Classification estimates for the 111th Senate:

Each senator is placed at their estimated ideal point in the ideological space. The diagonal cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line dividing yes from no votes in the space, indicates that the vote reflected both the primary ideological division between the parties (in this case, cutting "wasteful" government spending) and the second "social issues" dimension (feelings toward pointy-headed academics?).

For a different perspective, here are regional breakdowns of the vote from Govtrack.us with both a standard US map and one that is deformed to give each state equal area:

Note to Senator Coburn: This post was not funded by the NSF.

Update 11/9 7:02 AM: Stanford's Simon Jackman posted this graphic portraying the relationship between estimated ideal points along the primary ideological dimension* and the Coburn vote (click the graphic for a larger version):

It's especially useful for distinguishing the senators whose votes are not well-explained by their estimated ideal points in the first dimension.

* Jackman's estimates come from the Clinton-Jackman-Rivers algorithm for scaling roll call votes, which differs slightly from the Lewis-Poole algorithm used to produce the circular graphic above.

VA/NJ governor races not predictive

Underscoring a point I've made several times in the last week, Alan Abramowitz, a respected political scientist at Emory University, has a new analysis showing that the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial results are not predictive of midterm election seat changes:

[T]he results of the previous year's gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey did not predict the results of the midterm elections. Not only is the estimated coefficient for the Virginia/New Jersey election variable small and statistically insignificant, but it is in the wrong direction: the better Republicans did in Virginia and New Jersey, the worse they did in the subsequent midterm election.

A forthcoming paper in Legislative Studies Quarterly (via John Sides at The Monkey Cage) finds that changes in partisan control of House seats in special elections is predictive of general election outcomes. In the current context, these results suggest an environment that is slightly more favorable to Democrats due to the pickup in NY-23 (the only partisan change in a House special election this electoral cycle).

In reality, of course, Democrats will have a tough time in 2010 -- I fully expect them to lose a significant number of seats. But contrary to the media hype, the Virginia and New Jersey results don't provide much information about what that outcome is likely to be.

WSJ vs. WSJ on 2009 elections

Wall Street Journal, 11/3/09:

Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections
Outcomes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia Are Unlikely to Forecast Much About National Races in 2010, History Shows

Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren't always reliable indicators of what will happen in the wider federal and state races held in even-numbered years.

Wall Street Journal, 11/4/09:

Republicans Win in Key States

A Republican sweep in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday shifted the political terrain against President Barack Obama only a year after his historic election.

PS For the record, the WSJ was right the first time. Despite what the press will tell you, a handful of off-year elections don't tell us much about the "political terrain" facing Obama and the Democrats. As Matthew Yglesias points out, we have these things called "polls" that we can use to measure people's political beliefs and opinions. Perhaps we should consider using those instead.

Update 11/4 11:41 AM: Dave notes in comments that the first story includes a similar passage about the election potentially revealing "much tougher political terrain," which I missed:

A Republican sweep in Tuesday's key contests would at minimum show that Democrats face much tougher political terrain than they did a year ago.

I'm not sure what that means (the metaphor of "political terrain" is not well-defined) but it seems to contradict the lede of the story, which states that off-year elections are not reliable indicators. The point remains that the ledes of the two stories are in tension (if not in direct contradiction).

It's also worth noting note the contradiction between the election "show[ing]... political terrain" (11/3) and the results actually "shift[ing] the political terrain" (11/4). Maybe it's time to retire the metaphor, which lets reporters vaguely suggest that things have changed without specifying how.

Update 11/4 8:49 PM -- Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has a virtually identical item on the AP's election coverage:

The AP on Tuesday:

To be sure, it's easy to overanalyze the results of such a small number of elections in a few places. The results will only offer hints about the national political landscape and clues to the public's attitudes. And the races certainly won't predict what will happen in the 2010 midterm elections.

The AP on Wednesday:

To be sure, each race was as much about local issues as about firing warning shots at the politically powerful. But taken together, the results of the 2009 off-year elections could imperil Obama's ambitious legislative agenda and point to a challenging environment in midterm elections next year.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Frank Rich: Hack

As TNR's Jon Chait points out, Frank Rich's column about GOP infighting in New York's 23rd Congressional district is full of nasty rhetoric comparing the GOP to murderous regimes, cults, etc.:

[T]he real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada... [T]his pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field...

...[T]he right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama...

...To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send [GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava] to the guillotine.

...The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch

...Though [Beck, Palin and their acolytes] constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.

...It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

Rich has little basis for this hateful rhetoric. His objection is that conservatives supported a third party challenger to a moderate Republican candidate in NY-23 (the moderate, Scozzafava, has since withdrawn and endorsed the Democrat in the race). But as Chait points out, this is normal political behavior:

Some GOP hacks appointed a relative moderate to represent a district that could probably sustain a much more conservative representative, and conservatives are trying to elect a more right-wing alternative. What exactly is the problem here?

Chait then asks an excellent question -- would Rich feel the same way if the shoe were on the other foot?

[S]uppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic metaphors? There's a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you're not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

It turns out that we have a reasonably good comparison case -- Ned Lamont's 2006 challenge to Joe Lieberman. Lieberman isn't "anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights," but he, like Scozzafava, is far more moderate than his party's base. And yet Rich somehow wasn't quite as worked up about Lamont's challenge back in 2006 -- indeed, Rich described the reaction to Lieberman's primary defeat as a "hysterical overreaction":

[T]he death rattle of the domestic political order we've lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans' unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians' and pundits' hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman's defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center."

... Mr. Lamont's victory in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary has been as overhyped as Mr. Stone's movie. As a bellwether of national politics, one August primary in one very blue state is nearly meaningless. Mr. Lieberman's star began to wane in Connecticut well before Iraq became a defining issue. His approval rating at home, as measured by the Quinnipiac poll, had fallen from 80 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in July 2003, and that was before his kamikaze presidential bid turned "Joementum" into a national joke.

The hyperbole that has greeted the Lamont victory in some quarters is far more revealing than the victory itself. In 2006, the tired Rove strategy of equating any Democratic politician's opposition to the Iraq war with cut-and-run defeatism in the war on terror looks desperate. The Republicans are protesting too much, methinks. A former Greenwich selectman like Mr. Lamont isn't easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden. What Republicans really see in Mr. Lieberman's loss is not a defeat in the war on terror but the specter of their own defeat. Mr. Lamont is but a passing embodiment of a fixed truth: most Americans think the war in Iraq was a mistake and want some plan for a measured withdrawal. That truth would prevail even had Mr. Lamont lost.

A similar panic can be found among the wave of pundits, some of them self-proclaimed liberals, who apoplectically fret that Mr. Lamont's victory signals the hijacking of the Democratic Party by the far left (here represented by virulent bloggers) and a prospective replay of its electoral apocalypse of 1972. Whatever their political affiliation, almost all of these commentators suffer from the same syndrome: they supported the Iraq war and, with few exceptions (mainly at The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard), are now embarrassed that they did. Desperate to assert their moral superiority after misjudging a major issue of our time, they loftily declare that anyone who shares Mr. Lamont's pronounced opposition to the Iraq war is not really serious about the war against the jihadists who attacked us on 9/11.

That's just another version of the Cheney-Lieberman argument, and it's hogwash. Most of the 60 percent of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq also want to win the war against Al Qaeda and its metastasizing allies: that's one major reason they don't want America bogged down in Iraq. Mr. Lamont's public statements put him in that camp as well, which is why those smearing him resort to the cheap trick of citing his leftist great-uncle (the socialist Corliss Lamont) while failing to mention that his father was a Republican who served in the Nixon administration. (Mr. Lieberman, ever bipartisan, has accused Mr. Lamont of being both a closet Republican and a radical.)

In other words, ideological challenges to moderate candidates are a bad thing... except when they're not.

WSJ: "all medicine will be rationed"

The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes back to the future in the fight against health care reform with this remix of Betsy McCaughey's false claim about the Clinton health care plan:

ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

But unlike McCaughey, whose claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration's proposed system of managed competition was demonstrably false, the WSJ is making a slippery slope argument that can't be disproven. Nonetheless, it's absurd. Does anyone outside the WSJ think that "all medicine" in the US will be rationed?* Note that doing so would require government to bar people from privately contracting for medical services. That is extremely unlikely to happen regardless of whether the health care plan in Congress passes or not.

Later in the piece, the WSJ goes on to make the point that cost controls on spending in Medicare and the public option are inevitable:

As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

It's certainly also possible, as the WSJ implies above, that similar limitations will be placed on regulated private health insurance plans at some point in the future. However, these scenarios still fall short of supporting the claim that health care will have been "nationalized" or that "all medicine will be rationed via politics," both of which imply total government control of the health care sector.

Alexander wistful for bipartisanship

Lamar Alexander is the latest elite to push the golden age of bipartisanship meme:

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

First, as I've noted many times before, the bipartisanship of mid-century was a historical aberration driven by conservative Democrats who remained in their party due to the history of race in the South. After the parties realigned on race, the system returned to the norm of party polarization. As appealing as bipartisanship may seem to centrist pundits and minority party legislators, it came at a very high cost.

In addition, the issues are fundamentally different. The civil rights debate was bipartisan because civil rights split the party coalitions. By contrast, health care is an issue that aligns with the dominant cleavage between the two parties. In a more partisan era, there's no reason to expect either party to pass major domestic policy legislation in a bipartisan fashion.

Update 11/2 10:36 AM -- Matthew Yglesias expresses similar thoughts:

This is very confused, starting with the fact that Alexander started working as a Senate aide in 1967 by which time the main civil rights debate was over. Then any competent observer of American politics should realize that it’s no coincidence that the bipartisanship of the civil rights era vanished in the post-civil rights age. It was the debate over civil rights itself that created the unusual bipartisanship of mid-20th century America.